# Re: Mathematical selection

From: Paul Libbrecht <paul@activemath.org>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 13:35:13 +0200
Message-ID: <442BC271.6030100@activemath.org>
To: W Naylor <wn@cs.bath.ac.uk>
Cc: m.kohlhase@iu-bremen.de, Public MathML mailing list <www-math@w3.org>

W Naylor wrote:
> I though to try out the ORCCA tex -> MathML translator on your
> example:I input the document:
> \documentclass[11pt]{article}
> \begin{document} $$3*a+b$$ \end{document}
> and get out the MathML:
> <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="block" overflow="scroll">
>     <mn>3</mn><mo>*</mo><mi>a</mi><mo>+</mo><mi>b</mi>[/itex]
> now this is machine generated, (though I suspect that many authors would  be lazy and wouldn't put an mrow around the 3*a, if they were creating  this by hand)
>
Well, that's an example where solution-1
(presentation-tree-based-selection) is doing the same as text
selection... it clearly is wrong but if the author is aware of it, he
might have a macro at hand that could let him type
$$\r{3*a}+b$$
> In order for the machine generated MathML to include mrows at the
> appropriate places, it would be necessary to pay attention to precedence rules. It strikes me that though many of these are fairly universal, we  hit the usual ambiguity of presentation mathematics problem. Maybe this  could be circumvented using configuration files of some sort.
>
Contextual notations... to me this is equivalent to having a good
text-to-semantic converter such as QMath....
> One thing seems certain however, that is that there is a need for tools to  perform translations (like adding mrows in the appropriate places etc.)
>
Try QMath. It has drawbacks but it does much of that already.

paul

Received on Thursday, 30 March 2006 11:35:26 UTC

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